To-Do List: Assange Addresses U.S.; Tony Scott Dies

To know: Todd Akin, the Republican candidate running against Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, is under fire after he said that women who are victims of “a legitimate rape” are very unlikely to become pregnant. (Amy Davidson has more.) … Julian Assange spoke from the ground-level balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in England, calling on the U.S. to abandon the “witch-hunt” against WikiLeaks … Early investors in Groupon, including Marc Andreessen, have sold or shed most of their holdings in recent months—Groupon’s value on the market has fallen by nearly ten billion dollars since its initial public offering in November … The F.B.I. has probed a trip to Israel by G.O.P. freshmen lawmakers and leadership staff that culminated in a late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee, which included one naked congressman … Director Tony Scott died in an apparent suicide yesterday; he was sixty-eight.

To read: Jonathan Chait writes in New York about liberal news, media, and Hollywood:

Two decades ago, conservative anger against popular culture burned so intensely that it seemed at the time that Hollywood had come to fill the space in the right-wing fear center vacated by the end of Communism. The anger came out in an endless series of skirmishes. In 1989, after watching an episode of the sitcom Married With Children that included a gay man and a woman removing her bra, Michigan housewife Terry Rakolta (whose sister, Ronna Romney, married the brother of … yes, him) launched a national crusade against the show. Dan Quayle gave a speech denouncing the single-motherhood of Murphy Brown. Advertising boycotts by such groups as Christian Leaders for Responsible Television or Rakolta’s own Americans for Â­Responsible Television were a regular occurrence, as were anti-Hollywood rallies that drew thousands of protesters.

The country was “involved in a Â­Kulturkampf,” declared Illinois Republican congressman Henry Hyde, a “war between cultures and a war about the meaning of culture.” Liberals, too, considered their way of life threatened by the conservative campaign against Hollywood. “We are in the midst of a culture war,” announced the vice-president of People for the American Way, a group founded by liberal producer Norman Lear. In his keynote speech at the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan floridly exhorted his party to fight (or, in its view, fight back) in a “cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

When Buchanan delivered that terrifying (or exhilarating) speech in Houston, it would have been impossible to imagine that twenty years later, all traces of this war would have disappeared from the national political scene. If you visit Mitt Romney’s campaign website, the issues tab labeled “Values” lists Romney’s unwavering opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and Bushian opposition to stem-cell research, but nary a glancing reference can be found to the state of the culture, let alone a full-throated denunciation of Hollywood filth merchants. An immediate and easy explanation is that popular culture has ceased its provocations, or that the culture war has been shoved aside by the war over the role of government in the economy. The more uncomfortable reality is that the culture war is an ongoing liberal rout. Hollywood is as liberal as ever, and conservatives have simply despaired of changing it.

Thomas Lake writes forSports Illustrated about the funeral of Danny Roundfield, a former N.B.A. player, who died saving his wife from drowning:

He lay there in the open casket as light from a pale August afternoon came through the arch-shaped windows at the front of the funeral home. One by one, his friends looked at him, and they spoke to him quietly, and they wiped their eyes. There were a lot of tall men in the crowd, former NBA players you didn’t quite recognize, and they lined up to hug Bernie and say nice things. She was strong through the whole thing, unwavering, accepting the flood of condolences with dignity and grace. And when it was over, when the crowd had dispersed, after the sky through the windows had gone from pale blue to the color of summer peaches to the color of ash, she stood in the aisle about 10 feet from the casket and said, quietly, “He died saving me.”

It was something she had pledged not to talk about, but now she was talking anyway, saying just a few words on the topic that had so many people wondering.

“If I hadn’t cried out to him,” she said, deep in thought.

She was asked whether or not she’d spoken that night to the man in the casket, and she said there was not much left to say to him. She’d said it already, down in Aruba.

“Forgive me.”

“Forgive me.”

To watch: Tony Scott discusses his career, including working on the movie “Top Gun.”

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